On a late Thursday morning, three young chefs responsible for the Just8 pop-up restaurant gathered in the Montrose frame house where they had been holding forth all month.

Everyone looked a little bleary, because they'd been working 19-hour days and had stayed up well past 2 a.m., making head cheese out of local pastured pork.

After some discussion, that impromptu head cheese was destined for the evening's eight-course tasting menu, maybe with a mustard-green component, perhaps a vinaigrette, definitely some smoke. Priced at $45 and offered on a BYOB basis, these menus were the bargain of the year — if not the decade - on the Houston dining scene: comparable in quality and inventiveness to some of the best of Europe and America's contemporary cuisine. My three Just8 dinners easily rivaled (and in some cases surpassed) the food I sampled at some top modern tables in Paris and Copenhagen earlier this summer.

How did Houston end up with a month-long parade of dishes comparable to what might be found at L'Astrance or Passage 53 in Paris, AOC in Copenhagen or Trio in Malmo, Sweden? Houston native Seth Siegel-Gardner, the softspoken instigator of Just8 (as in "Just August"), had finished some high-profile European kitchen apprenticeships (they're called stages, pronounced stah-zhez, in chefspeak) and wanted to test the waters back home as he decided on his next career move.

He recruited Houstonian Justin Yu, with whom he had worked at the late laidback manor, and Terrence Gallivan, whom he had met when they worked at Gordon Ramsay at the London in New York. He secured the 30-day use of Just Dinner restaurant at 1915 Dunlavy, a 36-seat space right around the corner from where he grew up. Yu and Gallivan took leaves from their jobs in California and New York, respectively, and the trio prepared to put their wide-ranging experience to work. It was, Siegel told me, a rare chance to "do all those ideas you have but never quite get to do in somebody else's restaurant."

What a chance it turned out to be. Just8's reservation book filled up within days after the venture was announced, and the waiting list grew to 200 plus. A determined black marketer might have cleaned up re-selling seats. A cynic might have written off the buzz as just a lot of pinheaded foodie fuss, but that cynic would have missed out on such simple, electric joys as Siegel-Gardner's pickled cabbage-stem snack.

That's right, cabbage stems: on Just8's snack platter, the usually discarded trimmings became lordly bites glossed with aioli and speckled with crunchy bits of roasted yeast.

Nudged out of its usual context, the yeast was as savory as pulverized chicken skin, and it left a warming effect on the tongue. "Damn," said one of my dinner companions upon tasting it. "I wish I had a shakerful of this stuff. I'd take it everywhere with me."

I want a shakerful of Just8's powdered kim chee in my pocket, too. The deep red dusting was electric atop a swirly tower of butter whipped with Revival Meats' heirloom pork lard. As part of the bread service, that lardo butter mutated over the course of the month: first dappled with cocoa nibs to echo the extravagantly pointy rye-and-cocoa-nib rolls; later customized for contrast with the tart heat of that slow-roasted Korean fermented cabbage. It was the kind of luminous detail that characterized every course at Just8. Even the peripherals of the tasting menu shone, from opening snacks to the final post-dessert morsel of fennel ganache inside a candy truffle.

In between lay a magical mystery tour of discovery and delight. Houston typically runs behind national and international dining trends, but here on Dunlavy Street were foraged sunflower hearts, trimmed and braised as if they were artichoke bottoms, then marinated for a poached Gulf shrimp course that could have graced the tables of Noma, chef and master forager Rene Redzepi's groundbreaking Copenhagen restaurant that some (including me) consider the best in the world.

Redzepi incorporates ash into some of his dishes (it was used like pepper in ancient Scandinavia), and so did the guys at Just 8: slow-roasting leeks overnight and crumbling the results into a yogurt that streaked across the shrimp bowl for an earthy effect.

Over the course of the month, as dishes evolved and a few early missteps were refined, I came to recognize earthiness - along with an unusually keen interest in texture - as a Siegel-Gardner trait. Yu brought a feel for the Asian flavors he grew up with, and a zest for the vegetable world acquired in the kitchen of Ubuntu, the Northern California vegetarian mecca where he has worked for the past two years. Gallivan contributed intricate meat and fish courses that leapt with tartness. I can't stop thinking about his deconstructed rabbit "choucroute," galvanized by a dollop of pickled-red-cabbage puree.

Other than the sheer physical and intellectual pleasure of my dinners, what I most appreciated about Just8 was the fact that it could have happened nowhere else on the planet. The menus were organized around what was available here and now, in the brutal heat of late-summer Houston, when gardens are either hammered or priming for fall. The chefs connected with unique local suppliers like Revival Meats, Houstonian Morgan Weber's heirloom pastured breeds business down in Yoakum; and Houston Dairymaids, Lindsey Schechter's curated collection of Texas cheeses.

Other than the sheer physical and intellectual pleasure of my dinners, what I most appreciated about Just8 was the fact that it could have happened nowhere else on the planet. The menus were organized around what was available here and now, in the brutal heat of late-summer Houston, when gardens are either hammered or priming for fall. The chefs connected with unique local suppliers like Revival Meats, Houstonian Morgan Weber's heirloom pastured breeds business down in Yoakum; and Houston Dairymaids, Lindsey Schechter's curated collection of Texas cheeses.

The trio looked into friends' backyards for green elderberries to enliven a dish of poached grouper fanned with cucumber and radish, with a stealth puree of tart pumpernickel hiding underneath. They scrounged sunflowers for their bases, then (after that one glorious shrimp dish experimentation) found the prep time prohibitive. They plucked the slightly sour, succulent stems of purslane, which grows like a weed here, and used them to light up a stunning dish of pan-fried sweetbreads with clams and an eggplant caviar that had been smoked over hay.

It's debatable whether the Just8 concept could survive as a real restaurant in Houston, since its price structure was set so low. Yet as an idea incubator Just8 was a resounding success. It modeled a lively modern service style in which the chefs came to the table to explain each dish.

The nibs, powders, crumbles, purees, seeds, ices, filmy crisps and airy puffs that cavorted across my plates during the course of a single dinner were mind-expanding.

It's rare to feel invigorated during a Houston August. This year was different.